Blizzard had the servers confiscated. The servers were located in France and after some time, Blizzard's lawyers managed to have the French law-enforcement to break in and take down all the servers.

A lot of people moved to either TBC or WotLK. The majority of those who wanted to keep playing Classic move to Elysium-Project. But there were some immature drama between the staff members, leading to the creation of yet another new private server.. Light's Hope.

Currently Elysium-Project has about 1k players online while Light's Hope has over 10k. Don't go to Elysium. The owner of Elysium is butthurted that almost everyone left to Light's Hope so he keeps trying to hack the Light's Hope servers and bring them down. Like I said.. immature drama from both sides.

Bartooc wrote:Blizzard shut down Nostalrius. They were threatening to take them to court.

Nostalrius received a C&D letter, and they chose to comply & ceased operations.They also started a petition, and in doing so, they have opened Blizzard's eyes to the possibilities of classic WoW servers.

To be honest, they have to. If you do not defend intellectual property you can lose it ( at least according to US law ). If I was blizzard I wouldn't want to lose the warcraft IP over a few thousand neckbeards that still play vanilla.